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700 pounds (320 kg) The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer. [1] Limited by the technology of the day, and execution, the device has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC's priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete. [2]
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries, if not millennia, the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century. Lee De Forest invented the triode in 1906.
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that ...
Eventually, mass production of 5.25" drives resulted in lower prices, and after about 1984, they pushed cassette drives out of the US home computer market. 5.25" floppy disk drives would remain standard until the end of the 8-bit era. Though external 3.5" drives were made available for home computer systems toward the latter part of the 1980s ...
An open PDP-8/E with its logic modules behind the front panel and one dual TU56 DECtape drive at the top. A "Straight-8" running at the Stuttgart Computer Museum. The earliest PDP-8 model, informally known as a "Straight-8", was introduced on 22 March 1965 priced at $18,500 [ 3 ] (equivalent to about $178,900 in 2023 [ 4 ]).
John Vincent Atanasoff OCM (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. [1] Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College (now known as Iowa State University). Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 ...
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 [1] to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded [2] as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it ...